63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

Divine discourse in Virgil’s Aeneid 267
and some examples of this will be cited below. More prevalent, but more
difficult to define, are larger stylistic features which point to traces of
conversational situations in literary contexts. Here I find useful Chahoud’s
categories of these features, as follows (I will refer to these categories as
Chahoud 1, etc.):
1. Expressions of contact, e.g. exclamations, curses, fossilised imperatives,
stereotyped questions, forms of address
2. Loose syntax showing the emotion of the speaker, e.g. parataxis, parenthesis,
anacoluthon, simplified constructions, emotive collocation of
words
3. Brevity, e.g. brachylogy, interruptions, aposiopesis, ellipsis, euphemism,
pregnant usages
4. Redundancy, e.g. anaphora, pleonasm, periphrasis, exaggeration
5. Irony, e.g. understatement, litotes
6. Imagery, e.g. metaphor, ambiguity, concretisation of abstracts
7. Diminutives.
As Chahoud herself acknowledges, it is sometimes difficult to decide
whether some of the features are colloquial or not in a literary text; in
a poetic context, this problem is particularly acute, as some features in
the list above are established elements in poetry long before Virgil (e.g.
Chahoud 4, 5 and 6). Nevertheless, this investigation will try to trace
‘colloquial’ features as presented and transformed within the literary Kunstsprache
of Virgilian epic, looking not only at lexical items but also at
how broader conversational features are translated into the very unconversational
medium of Virgilian hexameters. I will briefly consider four
sample scenes of divine conversation in the Aeneid, which involve the three
major divine characters in all possible combinations: 1.227–97 (Venus,
Jupiter), 4.90–128 (Juno, Venus), 10.5–117 (Jupiter, Venus, Juno), 12.791–
842 (Jupiter, Juno).
3 venus and jupiter (aeneid 1.227–97)
In this famous scene Venus complains to her father Jupiter about the current
tribulations of her son Aeneas, and is comforted by Jupiter’s prophecy
of Aeneas’ future establishment of the Roman nation; Venus’ speech covers
lines 229–53, Jupiter’s lines 257–96. Neither speech contains many
obviously colloquial lexical items, though both contain many features of
conversational situations, naturally adapted to an elevated literary context.
Anaphora (Chahoud 4) is particularly frequent in Venus’ speech, expressing
high emotion and indignation, especially in lines 231–7: